Rule 34 and TIFF Productions in the Clouds

http://ow.ly/i1fAw

An article by Josh Gilliland, Esq., posted on his Bow Tie Law Blog.

The article discusses an interesting case in which a dispute as to the form of production arose over production of images.  The plaintiff produced information that was cut and pasted from various blogs, and provided to counsel in the form of an email...which was then printed and turned over to opposing counsel as a hard copy of approximately 100 pages.

There was no specified agreement as to form of production among the parties, but the court noted that plaintiff's production was not sufficient under Rule 34.

The author provides some of his own thoughts, by stating, "...this case was not the “standard” discovery dispute of email from Outlook or Excel files, but online content. These types of cases battling over the production of online content will become the “new normal,” given the use of webmail, social media and the vast use of smartphones and tablets to create content with remote computing systems.

It is very understandable that attorneys may not know how to have this information captured after a decade of case law focused on native files, metadata or maintaining the parent-child relationship between email and attachments.

“Cloud discovery” calls for a collection expert knowledgeable in “cloud” collections, who can develop the most cost and time effective means to capture responsive discovery in a legally defensible manner. It is also entirely possible, depending on the case, that searchable PDF’s would be a reasonably useable form for a cloud discovery production."